Saturday, August 23, 2008

Over at Pyr-O-Mania, editor Lou Anders has a great post about what SFF we recommend to others and why recommending the "classics" of the past may do the genre a disservice.

Lou writes:

I was in Barnes & Noble some months back and bumped into a friend of mine with his daughter. He told me she had been assigned Fahrenheit 451 at school, to which I replied, "You poor girl. You are going to hate it. It's about an old man whining that his wife watches too many soap operas, and nothing happens it it until the cities arbitrarily blow up at the end on cue. Please don't think that's the sort of thing I do for a living. Come with me." Then I walked her over to a display of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies books and said, "Here, this is much more representative of contemporary SF. Try this."

Now, lest the "classic-loving reader" get into a tizzy, read the rest of Lou's article. There's a context.